A rather prominent for sale sign appears on the homepage of HarvardConnection.co, which bears a design resembling the original Facebook site -- let's see how long it's allowed to stay up.

A rather prominent “for sale” sign appears on the homepage of HarvardConnection.co, which bears a design resembling the original Facebook site.

The seller of the page, Jeffrey Bachand, presumably hopes to fetch a decent sum for the web address, but at this point, who’d want to buy it?

Perhaps if a sequel to The Social Network were underway, the makers of the film might want to buy the domain, but the more direct address, HarvardConnection.com, remains for sale, only without the fancy dressing and from a different seller.

We suspect that ongoing litigation might be keeping the original founders of HarvardConnection.com from wanting to buy Bachand’s domain, but not a lawsuit with Facebook and its Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. While that litigation is over, a piece of the settlement from that case is being sought by developer Wayne Chang.

The other legal consideration involving the HarvardConnection.co page might concern whether said site has Facebook’s permission to use its likeness. Most likely not, so we don’t expect to see “TheOldFacebook” design stay on Bachand’s page for very long. What do you think, readers?

I asked Bachand for some clarification about the HarvardConnection.co site and here’s what he said:

I am the owner, creator, operator. I came up with the idea after a job interview for a programming position at MIT fell through back in February. I was able to find the original source to some of the first facebook pages that Mark Z had programmed, which are now slightly modified but a majority is the same code that he wrote. From there I recreated the backend in custom PHP, and created the facebook application integration.

Like the original Facebook, if you are part of a college network on Facebook, it will place you in that network in harvardconnection, and not allow browsing people outside of your college network.

In true Facebook form, I don’t want to monetize the site right away, and am focused on user growth and experience. In the future, I would like to build each stage of facebook as it grew, and allow users to choose their preferred stage.

I have sent letters to Eduardo Saverin, the Winklevoss twins, and Mark Zuckerberg to inform them of my intent on the site, and have had multiple Facebook engineers become members on the site.